


Predictable

by story_monger



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 19:45:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4534974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s predictable, and he knows that.<br/>Want to see the Mulder guy do some flips? Stick him in front of a missing child’s report; make it a little girl with dark hair. Watch him run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Predictable

He’s predictable, and he knows that.

Want to see the Mulder guy do some flips? Stick him in front of a missing child’s report; make it a little girl with dark hair. Watch him run.

He feels sick. The motel air is tacky with damp and an edge of mold. The colors of the lamp and the bedspread and the carpet are too thick, too heavy; they look like the smell of congealed food. People talk too loudly somewhere outside the window, and Mulder wants to throw open his door and scream at them to shut the hell up.

They should know that there’s a girl missing, and she has dark hair, and she’s supposed to turn ten in a week.

The case documents sit on the table beside the door, and Mulder snatches them up in a disorganized pile as he leaves the room and walks — or more marches — a few doors to the right. He gives the group of talking people a good, long stink eye.

Scully might have seen Mulder’s outline passing the window, or sometimes Mulder lets himself imagine that enough years of working together have given them internal barometers of the other’s mood. But he only has to knock once before the door swings open. Scully hasn’t changed out of her suit yet.

“You could have given me a chance to shower,” she says. She steps back in the old choreography. He enters and tries to decide whether the damp smell is any better in here. He decides it isn’t.

“Did you find something?” she asks, and Mulder looks down to realize that the documents are still hanging from his hand.

“No,” he says. “I thought we could…” He shrugs one shoulder. Scully’s head tilts, her hair shifts copper, and he can almost pinpoint the moment that the light comes on.

He shouldn’t do this. He shouldn’t come stumbling to her like she’s always going to accept him, except she hasn’t batted him away yet, and he’s nothing if not a mess of hope and doggedness.

“Okay. We can talk out evidence again,” Scully says. She retreats to her still-made bed and perches on the cover. Better vantage point from there.

“Yeah,” Mulder says. He doesn’t move.

“Or try to trace the suspect’s path.”

“Maybe.”

Scully’s lips purse a little. She braces her hands against the edge of the bed.

“I have trouble with the murders of young women,” she says. “The ones almost my age but a little younger.”

Mulder makes a sound, and it’s not a laugh, not at all, but it’s a release of something. He moves across the mold-smelling, congealed food-resembling room. The mattress dips with the combined weights of him and Scully. Her shoulder presses into his upper arm, and her ribs expand into his side with each inhale. She smells like light summer sweat and faded deodorant and like something alive.

He lets the case documents sit in his lap and curl in the damp air.

 

 


End file.
